Firefox 17 – Waiting for the Official Debut

Only Extended Support Release available at the moment

Today’s the day for Firefox to move to a new major version. Although the stable for Firefox 17 is not yet out into the open, Mozilla already has the release notes prepared.

The differences, compared to the beta, are almost inexistent. The big news for the soon-to-be-released Firefox 17 is that it features click-to-play plugin blocks. This is a new way to protect the user from outdated plugins that might also be vulnerable security-wise, by simply not loading them by default in a page.

Thus, the user becomes aware of the outdated components and is offered more control over the browsing experience.

We’ve learned that click-to-play will not be enabled by default because of trouble with updating the blocklistings and chances are we’ll see it enabled in Firefox 18. Also included in Firefox 17 is the Social API.

Additional changes in the upcoming release touch on the Awesome Bar experience, which sports a larger set of icons.

Firefox 17 is also the last version of the browser users running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) can update to.

At the moment, you can try Firefox 17 ESR (Extended Support Release), for Windows, Mac or Linux, which is based on the official version of the browser. Keep in mind that Firefox ESR maintenance is generally limited to high-risk/high-impact security vulnerabilities.

UPDATE:Firefox 17 has not been officially released, yet, but you can get it from Softpedia (check the links below)